Blogging — Page 10 — You are in My World Now

Create a Squidoo lens to promote your site

July 13, 2007 by Tricia

Hey, have you joined Squidoo yet? It’s another great way to promote your website or blog. You can also make some money while you are at it.

Squidoo isn’t a social network and it isn’t a web directory. It’s a site where you can make a lens for your website or if you don’t have a website you can make a lens about whatever you are interested in – hobbies, politics, religion … anything.

I bet your wondering what a lens is? Well, to keep it simple, think of a lens as a resume for your website. You can sign up with squidoo and make a basic lens in as little as five to ten minutes.

What I’ve done for this blog was to just make a preliminary lens. I added a short description of the site. Then, using the RSS feed module I added this sites feed to the lens, and a subscription link for my feedburner feed for this site.

When I have a bit more time I’ll add a small image of the blog in the description area and perhaps expand the description. Then I’ll perhaps add the flickr module so that I can show off some of my photos.

I’ll also be sure to add modules for Amazon, Ebay and a few of the other affiliate modules that can be added to Squidoo lens. You see if you set up affiliate modules and choose items that compliment your site if anyone who visits your lens clicks on any of the items or even better makes a purchase you’ll share in the profits with Squidoo.

If you visit the lens I created for this site you’ll see that it still needs a lot of work but it’s off to a good start. The lens that I made for my gardening blog on the other hand is perhaps almost finished. Take a peek at the As the Garden Grows Lens to see what you can do when you add in several of the available modules.

You can add YouTube video, photos, similar links and many other things … basically there’s no limit to what you can add. You could even treat your lens like a blog and update it regularly by changing information or writing a new post in the text module area every once in a while.

Check it out. Oh and if you do decide to sign up I’d appreciate it if you’d click on one of the Squidoo links above, or this one as I’ll make $5 for referring you!

CPU resources over used – trying to fix my sites!

July 4, 2007 by Tricia

Sorry for the lack of new posts lately. I’ve had a major problem with my web host. I got a message last Thursday evening from them stating that my sites were using too much of their CPU resources so they had moved all my sites and domains over to a slower non production server in order to give me time to fix the problem.

Well, I’ve upgraded all the WP blogs to the latest WordPress version and I have one of my websites running on Joomla so I upgraded that to the latest stable version too. That kept me busy for at least two whole days!

The rest of the time was spent going over just about every file in my directories to make sure that no new files or folders were added to my server that could be causing a problem. I got hacked once when I was with another web host and that caused a ton of problems.

I really can’t find a problem so I don’t know what’s going on. I’m still getting messages from my web host saying that the CPU resources are still high so I might have to move to a Virtual private server.

I don’t want to do that because 1. it’s more expensive, and 2. I’ll have to learn a whole new hosting system. I can barely keep up with my sites these days … I don’t want to learn a new hosting system!

Anyway … if you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been around you now know what’s been going on.

If any of you have had similar problems I’d love to hear how you solved them.

Keeping track of my finances

June 22, 2007 by Tricia

As many of you know I earn my income through my websites. Whether it’s posts on my blogs, selling text links in my sidebars, affiliates, Google adsense or whatever else of the many things I do to earn an income.

Do you know how hard it is the keep track of everything? It’s not like I’m getting paid once a month by most of these companies. No .. I’ve actually got money coming in daily.

So I think I need to get some kind of financial reporting software. It would help me keep track of my income daily, weekly and monthly and if I found the right software it might even help when it comes times to create statements for tax purposes.

I’ve got to look into this further.

Still figuring out redirects for some sites

June 21, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve been trying to work on my websites so that they will either redirect to an url with www in it, or without www. I’ve managed to do this for all of my sites but one. It’s a CMS site that runs on Joomla. A very old version of Joomla.

Looks like I’ll have to start brushing up on Joomla info as well as upgrade the site in order to find out how I can maintain the url with a www in it. Htaccess 301 redirects don’t seem to work.

Anyone else do an Htaccess 301 redirect on a Joomla run site? if so, how did you do it?

Calling it in

June 19, 2007 by Tricia

This is strange. In the past month I’ve actually been asked to do a few speaking engagements regarding my success with websites and blogging.

One business contact is holding a series of four seminars and they begin next week. The seminars are out of town so I can’t attend in person. He’d decided that perhaps he’d just do a phone interview with me and I suppose, hand out the interview to seminar attendees.

Now he’s changed his mind.

He wants to call me during the seminars and interview me via a conference call. He says the calls will only be 5 minutes. Somehow I doubt that … but $50 bucks for a short phone interview? I’m not sure yet. but I might do it.